A Passion for Killing (11 page)

‘Yes?’

‘Inspector, I think I’m getting some sort of carpet blindness,’ Roditi said. ‘I’m looking at the picture you gave us and then at this rug, and I don’t know whether there’s any similarity or not.’

It didn’t help that the picture Peter Melly had given İkmen had been in black and white. Of course, by virtue of its age, that was to be expected, but it was scant consolation to those trying to pick the Lawrence carpet out from piles of other old carpets and rugs. Not that İkmen entirely understood what his officers were going through. The picture of the Kerman, with its amazing central tree motif had had an immediate emotional effect upon him that meant he could not possibly mistake any other piece for it. Raşit Bey had said that the motif in question was indeed a Tree of Life – just as Peter Melly had said – a very potent occult image across the Christian and Jewish worlds as well as that of Islam. He took both the rug and the picture from the hands of poor, tired old Roditi and looked at both with a sigh. There was absolutely no similarity between them. But Roditi had been looking at carpets for over eight hours, he was middle-aged, he was tired, and İkmen knew that he had a daughter currently going through a very acrimonious divorce.

‘You take over from Yıldız,’ he said and then he nudged the younger man who was still watching his distressed friend walk towards one of the many exits from the bazaar. ‘Hikmet? Sergeant Ergin will be all right.’ He pushed the picture of the Kerman into one of Yıldız’s hands and said, ‘Take over from Roditi. Up the metal staircase . . .’

‘I’ve done the room on the right,’ Roditi told him. ‘I’m about halfway through the one on the left. Then there are two rooms above that and one in the roof.’

Hikmet Yıldız’s eyes widened.

‘Go on,’ İkmen said as he ushered him over towards the staircase. ‘Go and look at carpets. Perhaps if you learn enough when you’ve had it with policing, you can open a shop of your own.’

The younger man trudged heavily up the metal staircase. İkmen offered Roditi a cigarette, which he took with a grateful nod. After a moment of silent puffing he said, ‘Inspector?’

‘Yes?’

‘Do you really think that this Uzun hid the Kerman in his own shop?’

‘Not really, no,’ İkmen said as he too took and lit up a cigarette. ‘But if we don’t do this and the carpet does turn out to be here . . . No, Roditi, if it exists it must be somewhere and Mr Melly of the British Consulate claims to have seen it with his own eyes.’

‘Perhaps he’s got it himself, sir, the Englishman.’

‘That has occurred to me, Roditi, yes,’ İkmen said. ‘And I will be interviewing Mr Melly as well as everyone else who was at the Klaassens’ home in Peri on the night of the carpet show. Have you ever been out to Peri, Roditi?’

‘No, sir. Don’t much like the forest. Can’t stand all the insects.’

‘It’s an odd place,’ İkmen continued as he watched several of the traders nearby shutter and then lock up their premises. It was nearly closing time at the Kapalı Çarşı. Soon all but Raşit Bey and his employees and the police would be gone. Then the great bazaar would be dark, silent and given over only to the ghosts İkmen knew had to be around in abundance on such an ancient site. ‘Peri’, he continued, ‘is basically a diplomatic village. The British school is over there. It’s a very modern and very neat village. No one parks their car in the middle of the road, there are private security guards to keep everybody safe . . . the shops are amazing. Coffee shops, pet shops, beauty parlours, a bakkal that sells truffles from France and complicated teas from England.’

‘Sounds very nice, sir.’

‘Yes, doesn’t it? But it isn’t,’ İkmen said. ‘There may be no dirt or bad behaviour or ghosts like there are in abundance here in the Kapalı Çarşı, but I know where I’d rather be.’

‘Would you?’

‘Yes.’ İkmen looked up into the darkening vaulted ceiling of the venerable old Han and imagined, or maybe just caught, a whiff of a few old turbaned spectres haunting its arches. ‘Peri, on the surface, is not real. Nothing can be when decay exists underneath anything. Yaşar Uzun was murdered just outside this very nice clean place and I am yet to be convinced that some nice clean person, as opposed to some unsavoury gangster, wasn’t responsible for doing it.’

‘We’re being followed and so I’m going to say what I have to very quickly.’

A bemused İzzet Melik sat down opposite his superior and surveyed his opulent surroundings. Although the extravagant Art Nouveau grandeur of the Patisserie Markiz, not to mention the glamorous waiting staff, were completely in accord with what Melik felt Süleyman would find attractive, the inspector’s demeanour was paranoid in the extreme. A young man with porcelain skin who came over and asked whether the gentlemen were ready to order was told by a tight-lipped Süleyman, ‘Not yet. Leave us.’

Apart from two elderly ladies who sat conversing happily over by the front window, Patisserie Markiz was empty. Watching the door all the time as he spoke, Süleyman lowered his voice and said, ‘İzzet, what I am about to tell you must remain secret between us and only us. I can’t adequately express the seriousness of this except to say that if you break this confidence you and I are dead men. Do you swear to keep what I’m about to tell you only to yourself?’

There didn’t seem to be too much choice. ‘Yes . . .’

Ever since he had discovered that the call from Hakkari had in fact originated from that city’s jandarma station, Süleyman had believed that someone, Melik in all probability, needed to go out there to find out what was going on. But he couldn’t send him out there knowing nothing. If the man who was the peeper knew that Cabbar Soylu had killed his stepson – if indeed that were true – then it was very possible that was why Cabbar had been selected from so many gangsters for death. Mürsel had said that the peeper was on some sort of moral crusade and the murder of a defenceless and innocent mad boy was about as amoral as it got. Not that he had arrived at his decision to tell his deputy some of what he knew lightly. Right from the start, Mürsel had told Süleyman he would kill him and anyone he told if he ever divulged anything about the peeper’s status to anyone apart from Commissioner Ardıç. And so far he hadn’t. But now he was about to do so before whatever creature Mürsel had detailed off to pursue him this time came in to Markiz and sat down beside them.

‘İzzet,’ he whispered gently, with a smile on his face, as if to a lover.

‘Sir.’

‘The criminal we call the peeper, is not what he seems. He is an agent of the security services . . .’

‘MIT?’

‘No . . . yes,’ he stuttered over what he really didn’t fully know or understand. ‘I don’t know, something like that. But . . . he’s gone insane or something, this person, and his own people are trying to find him. Ardıç but only Ardıç knows. We have to investigate or look as if we’re investigating. They, his people, follow me. You must go out to Hakkari to look into whether Cabbar Soylu did indeed kill Deniz Koç.’

‘Yes, but sir, if we’re only pretending to look for this peeper . . .’

‘The peeper is on some sort of moral crusade.’ Süleyman put his hand over Melik’s which was laid out across the table. The sergeant flinched but the waiter smiled and changed his mind about trying to get an order from the two gay gentlemen just yet. ‘I think he’s targeting people who are not just bad but amoral too. I mean, look at the young boys he attacked last year.’

‘The queers?’

‘Yes. A number of those boys used the Saray Hamam in Karaköy which is a notorious haunt of very promiscuous gay men.’

‘Yes, but sir,’ İzzet whispered back, ‘not all of those boys went there, did they?’

‘No, and so I’m going to interview them again. If I’m right, there will be something else that marks them out, something wrong that—’ He stopped talking as soon as a tall, elderly man came into the patisserie and sat down at a table opposite their own. ‘So what would you like to drink, İzzet?’ he said as he beckoned the perfect waiter over to their table.

İzzet Melik, still stunned from the onslaught of the madness Süleyman had seemingly descended into, finally looked down at the tasteful little menu in the middle of his place setting. ‘Er . . .’

‘I think I’ll have tea myself,’ Süleyman said. And then, looking up with a smile at the waiter, he added, ‘And a slice of apple strudel too. İzzet?’

‘Oh, er, I think I’ll have an espresso and, er, yes, I will have apple strudel too, sir, er Mehmet, thank you.’

The waiter bowed. ‘Gentlemen,’ he said, and went on his way to the enormous glass cake cabinet at the back of the shop. Filled with sweet things that were not just tasty but fabulous to look at too, İzzet Melik under normal circumstances would be entranced. But not now. Now he was confused and worried because Süleyman was behaving very, very oddly. All the wisdom of criminology was against the idea that Cabbar Soylu could be a peeper victim and yet Süleyman had named him as just that. Süleyman wasn’t stupid and so it was possible that someone else was telling him how to think and what to do. But whether that person was a spy . . . There was, however, one thing that did give İzzet Melik much pause and that was the issue of forensics. Someone had tampered with evidence into the death of that male prostitute last year. He, Dr Mardin, Dr Sarkissian and Süleyman had known about it, even if the latter had very quickly dropped the subject. Now, again with Cabbar Soylu, there was evidence of tampering with forensic material. Dr Sarkissian would almost certainly have told Ardıç about any suspicions he might have and yet there had been nothing forthcoming from that quarter so far. Even the suspicion of evidence-tampering signalled a full-scale investigation. Usually. But then those involved in the dark arts of national security were not usually involved.

İzzet Melik put one large, rough hand up to his now aching head just as his apple strudel was set down in front of him by a very elegant, perfumed hand.

Mary Doyle was annoyed and she didn’t care who knew it. Doris Klaassen, in her quiet, Dutch way, felt that Mary was behaving like a caricature of a ball-breaking American woman. She knew that her husband Wim, the English couple, Peter Melly and his wife, as well as the Israeli Pinhas Rabin, were all thinking just about the same thing. But trapped with her inside Wim’s Toyota people carrier there really was no escape. Doris looked out of the window just as Mary started again.

‘Who the hell does he think he is?’ she said. ‘Telling – ordering – us to come to him?’

‘Mary, it is quite normal for police to ask people to come into police stations to give evidence after a crime has been committed,’ Wim said gravely. ‘Inspector İkmen is not doing anything out of the ordinary.’

‘He could have come to our homes,’ Mary Doyle continued. ‘I mean, it’s George who works at the consulate, not me. I don’t need to come into the city. It would have been better for me if this Turkish inspector had come to my house.’

‘But I’m driving you, aren’t I, Mary?’ Wim said. ‘And so there really is no problem, is there?’

‘No, but . . .’ Mary Doyle had never had any children. At fifty-five she was bored with her overworked diplomat husband. All she could bring herself to like about poor old George Doyle in recent years was his bank balance. If Mary had any passion in her life it was for gazing at and buying vast quantities of oriental carpets. ‘I only came in to the carpet show towards the end. I missed that fabulous Van kilim that you bought, Wim. Goddammit! I’d had to go to that God-awful reception with George. I didn’t get away until after ten.’

‘But you saw Yaşar,’ Wim Klaassen said. ‘And that is the point. Everyone present at the show must give a statement to the police. Mary, you know that some people were only with us for an hour because they went to the same reception that you did. But the inspector must see all of these people too.’

‘I know, but . . .’ She carried on, to the amusement of most in the car, but to the annoyance of Peter Melly. Mary bloody Doyle was grating on his nerves which were already strung out like piano wires over this Yaşar Uzun affair. All the loud-mouthed American had to do was make a statement about her uninteresting life to the police. He had a priceless carpet to somehow find and get back to the UK! Matilda didn’t know about the one hundred and twenty grand he’d already spent on the Lawrence carpet, but he couldn’t keep information like that from her for ever – thank God the only friends who did know, Wim and Doris, were good at keeping schtum. Thank God also that Matilda hadn’t been at the show the night Yaşar died, so the police didn’t want to see her. She’d hitched a ride into the city to get more bloody wool or some such nonsense.

‘Oh, Wim, do you have to smoke?’ Mary Doyle whined as soon as the Dutchman put an unlit cigar in his mouth.

‘No, Mary, of course not. I am sorry.’

The Israeli, Pinhas Rabin, who was the only other person in the car apart from the Klaassens who could speak Dutch, said to Doris, ‘Does that woman ever shut up?’

Both Wim and Doris smiled.

It was nine-thirty and at ten he was due to interview all the people who had attended Yaşar Uzun’s carpet show in Peri. Being mainly westerners they were bound to be horribly punctual, but İkmen felt he had to make at least a little time for this poor distressed man sitting in front of him with his baby in his arms. Abdullah Ergin didn’t really look like much of a sergeant even in the Tourism Police just at that moment. His eyes were still wet with tears but then his wife had still not been located.

‘Tell me about Handan,’ İkmen said and then made a funny face at Ergin’s very contented baby Ali, who smiled back at him broadly.

The Tourism policeman shrugged. ‘Well, she has black hair and green eyes, she’s thirty . . .’

‘No, no, no,’ İkmen said, ‘you’ve given us a photograph of Handan and we know how tall she is and all of that. No, I mean what does she do, what type of person is she?’

‘What does she do? She looks after me and Ali and our apartment on Professor Kazim İsmail Gürkan Caddesi.’